Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor in the Meredith Kercher murder case, plays a mesmerizing heavy in the page-turning The Monster of Florence: A True Story.

Written by famed thriller writer Douglas Preston with his entertaining Italian sidekick, Italian journalist Mario Spezi, this literary true crime book is about the endless hunt for the serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. His official spree started in 1968, although the authors argue convincingly that he may have murdered others long before that.

Bright, focused, complex, Mignini enters this tale as a full-steam-ahead prosecutor with visions of group conspiracies and satanic rituals dancing through his head.

Most of the book is, of course, about the serial killer who killed 14 people, preying on lovers parked out in the gorgeous hills of Tuscany. Spezi, working alone at first and then with Preston, tries to crack this case. I promise not to give away who they think the killer is.

The most memorable scene captures the collateral damage every murder inflicts. Preston and Spezi drop in on Winnie Rontoni in a ruined villa, years after her daughter’s death.

“She told us that her husband, Renzo, a highly paid marine engineer who traveled all over the world, had quit his job to pursue justice for his daughter full-time. Every week he visited police headquarters in Florence, asking for fresh news and consulting with investigators, and on his own he had offered large monetary rewards for information. He had frequently appeared on television or radio, appealing for help. He had been scammed more than once. The effort eventually ruined his health and drained their finances. Renzo died of a heart attack on the street outside the police station after a visit. Signora Rontoni remained in the big villa all alone, selling off the furniture piece by piece, and sinking ever deeper into debt.”

Spezi asks Signora Rontoni why she still wears a gold necklace engraved with the initials P and C, for her daughter Pia and her murdered lover Claudio.

“For me,” she said, touching the necklace, “life ended on that day.”PM Mignini doesn’t show up until page 210, but he’s worth the wait. We meet him struggling to connect the Monster case to the mysterious death of Dr. Francesco Narducci of Perugia. (A case he still pursues while under investigation for abuse of power in the Monster case for allegedly wiretapping police officers and journalists.).

Through a wildly imaginative use of an ambiguous intercepted phone call, he theorizes that Narducci was killed by loan sharks “some of whom might be in contact with the Red Rose or another diabolical sect. Therefore the loan sharks and the Narducci killing might be connected in some way with the Monster of Florence murders.”

As in the Kercher case, the press eagerly laps up every new detail sans analysis.

“The new investigative theories offered up succulent gothic scenarios that were leaked to the press. Dr. Narducci, the press reported, had been the guardian of the fetishes cut from the women. He had been killed to keep from spilling the beans. Some of the richest families in Perugia had been involved in sinister cults …”

Preston and Spezi find these theories, which now include switched bodies, fantastical. But Mignini turns the tables, making them targets of the investigation. Preston, after being interrogated by Mignini, quickly exits the country with his wife and kids.

Like the three Kercher suspects, Spezi is forced to seek R&R in Capanne prison after being arrested on charges of slander and defamation, disturbing the public order, and obstructing a criminal investigation.”

Throughout the book Preston casts himself as the new guy in town, with Spezi the hardboiled Italian crime expert.

Spezi is always worth listening to. Here he explains “compatible,” the word most flaunted in the Kercher case:

“Compatible, not compatible, and incompatible are the baroque inventions of Italian experts who don’t want to take responsibility. Using ‘compatible’ is a way to avoid admitting they haven’t understood anything. Was the bullet in Pacciani’s garden inserted into the monster’s pistol? ‘It is compatible.’ Was that laryngeal break inflicted by someone who intended to kill? ‘It is compatible.’ Was that painting done by a monstrous psychopath? ‘It is compatible.’

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no–in short, we don’t know! If the experts are chosen by the investigators, they say their results are ‘compatible’ with the theories of the prosecution; if they are chosen by the defendants they say that their results are ‘compatible’ with the theories of the defense. That adjective should be outlawed!”

Maybe this explains how a flick knife and a much larger kitchen knife can both be “compatible” with the wounds in the Kercher case. Or how a bloody footprint can one day be compatible with a person’s foot and then the next day all is confusion. Or how a bra strap can suddenly move around a room and, well, let’s move on.

Monster features a superb meeting between Preston and Mignini in Mignini’s elegant office in Perugia. Sans the helpful Spezi, Preston is indeed a stranger in a strange land. At first he is calm and then he starts to sweat. Soon he will be terrified.

As he recalls: “Behind a desk sat the public minister of Perugia himself, Judge Giuliano Mignini. He was a short man of indeterminate middle age, well groomed, his fleshy face carefully shaved and patted. He wore a blue suit and carried himself like a well-bred Italian, with a large sense of personal dignity, his movements smooth and precise, his voice calm and pleasant.”

Mignini, the same prosecutor to interrogate Amanda Knox, lets Preston know he has the right to an interpreter, “but that finding one might take many hours, during which I would be inconveniently detained. In his opinion I spoke Italian fluently. I asked if I needed a lawyer and he said that, although it was of course my right, it wasn’t necessary, as they merely wanted to ask a few questions of a routine nature.”
The Mignini technique:
1. An hour of genteel questioning
2. Abrupt shift into a dark, accusatory tone
3. Loud interruptions. Angry speeches
4. Repeating questions over and over, phrased in different ways and different forms.
5. Frequent reading back of previous answers. You said THIS. Now you say THAT.
6. Sudden introduction of a wiretapped phone call.
7. Constant replaying of that conversation. A demand to explain every single word.
8. Sudden accusations of guilt.

At the end Preston was told that he was now indatago for the crime of reticence and making false statements. He was refused both a transcript of the two-and-a-half-hour interrogation and a copy of the two-page “statement” he was asked to sign.

No wonder he flew the coop.

Hard as this book is on the Italian legal system, a deep love for Italy, Italians and Italian culture permeates it. Particularly on the part of Preston, who often sounds like a man locked out of paradise. Technically he is now free to return. Spezi, too, is out of hot water, his case “archived” earlier this year. (Note: Alas, it turns out that Spezi, while remaining out of prison is not out of hot water after all. He is now once again under a cloud of suspicion).

The Kercher suspects may find solace in the fact that the Italian legal system does offer a sort of replay should they be found guilty.

“In Italy, a man condemned to a life sentence is automatically granted an appeal before the Corte d’Assise d’Appello, with a new prosecutor and a fresh panel of judges. One of the great strengths of the Italian judicial system is the appeals process, in which none the players involved in the appeal–prosecutors or judges–have an axe to grind.”

Who knows what could happen after that?

“After all,” writes Preston, “this is Italy.”
Italian terms, legal and otherwise, defined in this book

1. Furbo. Describes someone who’s “wily and cunning, who knows which way the wind is blowing, who can fool you but never be fooled himself.”

2. Diffamazione a mezzo stampa. Defamation by means of the press, a criminal charge that any public official can ask to have lodged against a journalist.

3. Dietrologia. The idea that the obvious cannot be the truth. To be powerful you must always appear be in the know about everything–and distrustful of reality. So a man may appear to be going out for coffee. But what, you wonder, is he really doing? Or a man may commit suicide, but that’s too simple. He must, you think, have been murdered.

4. Indagata. To be formally named as the “official suspect of a crime, your name recorded in a book along with the reasons why. It is one step short of an actual indictment in the American sense, although in Italy it amounts to much the same thing, especially in terms of public opinion and the effect it has on the person’s reputation.”

5. Il telefonino e’ brutto. The phone is tapped.

6. Segreto istruttorio. Under a judicial order of secrecy (e.g., charges against an individual).

7. Lo sconto. Discount given in restaurants and elsewhere to local residents.

8. Fregatura.. “Doing something in a way that is not exactly legal, not exactly honest, but just this side of egregious. It is a way of life in Italy.”